Selling to Legal Teams: How to Demo Well

Live demos are simultaneously the best and worst ways of selling your product. When they go well, demos join the dots for the buyer. When they go badly, they can cannibalise hard-won goodwill. The good news is that good demos are all about planning, practice and presentation.

Here’s out tips from buy and sell-side perspectives on what makes and breaks a legaltech demo.

So here it is, how to demo like a pro to legaltech!

1. What to demo

Demo relevant

Assuming you spent time before the meeting and at the start of the meeting qualifying my needs, demo only that relevant to those needs. Do not follow the same old script that rushes through any and all features and use cases.

Be specific. Frame your demo within the identified prospect need or problem. Why? It reinforces that you’ve listened, taken the time to understand me and my needs. Furthermore, it makes it easier to join the dots between what the buyer needs and what you provide to fill that gap. The easier it is to join those dots, the better the demo’s persuasive power and influence. Specific examples of how to do this are set out below.

Demo well

Never work with children, animals or technology. Several of us at lawtomated demo many times a week, sometimes several times a day. Something more or less always goes wrong. The small stuff is kind of an accepted cost of demoing, e.g. having the wrong or missing cables to connect to a display.

Do this:

1. Be prepared. Have a list of targeted features, use cases and benefits that map to the identified needs of the prospect. Focus on these, their questions and nothing else.
2. Invite questions, but don’t be afraid to put a pin in them if you are about to answer that question or just coming to a feature or use case that will answer the question. Don’t lose your flow. The more “all over the place” the demo, the easier it is to wrongly infer the product is similarly dysfunctional.
3. Try to use data relevant to your prospect. If you are an AI contract review vendor, build demos that simulate real world — as opposed to esoteric or make-believe scenarios — and better still, prove they work scalably. For instance, extracting a clause from two or three virtually identical documents with very well signposted clauses is not impressive. Doing that across 10s of very different documents is impressive.
4. Know who is going to be in the room. Weaponise this information — use it to help you target your demo content and patter. If you can, identify who are the decision-makers, research them beforehand and demonstrate your understanding of their role and their work, ideally also how your product solves their need.
5. Know your tech. If you don’t know the answer, acknowledge this fact but immediately promise to find out the answer and report back. Simply saying “I don’t know” and moving on, or dodging the question, looks terrible.
6. Make sure the version you are demoing has been tested… too often, speaking from experience, releases are pushed onto demo sites without proper testing. Don’t get caught short.

Don’t do this:

1. Being totally unprepared for obvious questions about your product and / or its fit to my needs
2. Having the wrong person demo. Don’t send your most technical person to demo to lawyers unless they do so regularly. Likewise, don’t send your least technical salesperson to demo to a technical audience.
3. Skirting around obvious issues with the product… you may not think it’s obvious but it almost always is. If something in your demo environment is down or not quite fixed, be upfront. Don’t try and polish a turd. Sooner or later it starts to smell.
4. Have your technical team updating the demo environment. Demos going slow or offline is never a great look. Be sensible and plan maintenance, upgrades and migrations outside of your and your prospects’ business hours.
5. Have a single demo environment that multiple sales / presales people use simultaneously. This happens rather a lot. It looks awful if you’re midway through a demonstration only for the background data in the app to disappear or change completely.

Remember, we are looking for a partner, not a vendor. This is about trust. Build it from the beginning and things are a lot easier.

Demo what you have, not what you hope to have

There has always been, and no doubt always will be, a gulf between your demo and your product. That’s sales. That’s marketing. That’s tech. This holds true for the little players and the big boys. But don’t mug me off. If what you’re demoing is something hacked together an hour before, the night before or the weekend before your meeting… please, please do not demo it. I will find out sooner or later its BS. Remember you need to make me look good, not bad.

Promising product is at X level of development only to find — after a proof of value or trial — that it’s actually at X — 100 level only ends one way. Badly for you. You won’t get bought. Worse, legaltech is a village. Sooner or later word gets around about the honest vendors vs. the loose and fast. Which do you want to be?

The exception that proves the rule…

The only caveat to this is if you are either:

1. being asked to minimum viable product or prototypes from your future roadmap; or
2. have been asked to build something bespoke to demonstrated your stretch capabilities.

In which case, demoing potential rather than the here and now might be welcome. That said, in either case, be honest about the assumptions and qualifications involved. If what you’ve built can’t scale, or won’t scale without significant R&D or hardware, be honest and open about those concerns.

2. Who to bring

Opposites don’t attract

Provided you’ve done your homework beforehand, you should know who your audience will be. Generally speaking, try to match the audience to your team’s skills and experience. For instance:

Audience Who to bring 1. 100% IT A. Your best IT people who know the product inside and out. If the client-side IT include deep specialists in areas such as data science, machine learning or cybersecurity then try to bring your own experts in these fields to the extent you have them. Don’t let sales answer technical questions… it is invariably misjudged. 2. 100% legal / busines persons B. Your sales and presales team plus ubject matter experts (if any). Some legaltech vendors employ former lawyers specifically as subject matter experts, i.e. to talk lawyer to lawyers, build trust, demonstrate understanding and identify and qualify scope of needs and product fit. 3. A mix of 1 and 2 A mix of A and B.

Where you bring a mix of sales and technical people to the meeting, be sure to have created a culture of mutual respect and trust in your team. Let technical people answer technical questions and salespeople answer sales questions. You each bring something unique and valuable to the table — recognise and respect that.

We set out below a cautionary tale in the context of Slido where this went farcically awry.

Your best self

It can be extremely boring and forced demoing similar demos one after another, as is often the case in sales and presales. Try to be high energy, friendly and genuinely curious about your prospect. Doing so will create a positive feedback loop within yourself, but also between yourself and the buyer.

3. What to bring

Cables

Cables. Cables. Cables. First impressions matter and everyone, whether buyer or seller, hates the awkward and seemingly inevitable pantomime of finding the right cable to connect vendor laptops to buyer meeting room displays.

Yes, buyers should have their proverbial together, but often cables are lost or accidentally taken home from meeting rooms.

It costs very little to buy and maintain your own stash of the most popular cable connections, certainly much less than the cost of a lost deal.

Make sure all of your sales and presales (or anyone who is demoing) has at least these types of cables and / or adaptors:

1. HDMI
2. DVI
3. VGA
4. Displayport

Your charger

Believe it or not, it does happen. Vendors sometimes turn up with a dead, or close to dead laptop and no charger. If your selling to legal users they expect not only your product, but your individuals to be a safe pair of hands. Turning up so ill-prepared never looks good. Apart from anything, your demo will be rushed due to battery life paranoia, or worse, impossible should your laptop die mid demo.

4. Conference calls

Plan ahead

Make sure you are 100% clear regarding:

1. The attendees, and ensuring everyone who should attend has been sent the correct diary invite and dial-in details.
2. The dial-in format — is it audio, video or audiovisual? Make sure you are set-up beforehand to deal with whatever format is required, including having the necessary hardware, software and / or settings configured before the call starts.
3. What provider is being used? Webex, Zoom, GoToMeeting etc? Have you used them before — did they work? If not, try suggesting an alternative.
4. The time and date, including the timezone. Too often diary invites are sent out for the wrong time due to a timezone misunderstanding. Getting this wrong demonstrates a lack of attention to detail, nor understanding of the buyer’s business.

Be somewhere connected and quiet

This ought to go without saying, but sadly it doesn’t. Whilst buyers appreciate vendors are often moving around clients and prospects, it’s no excuse to take a conference call somewhere noisy and / or with woeful internet connectivity. If you can’t make the call in proper surrounds try to rearrange as early as possible.

A poor quality or noisy connection isn’t worth the effort.

Be on time

Don’t be late. Treat this exactly like a physical meeting. Too frequently vendors turn up late or on the dot yet aren’t set-up to begin the call at the stated time. Just because its a conference call doesn’t mean it’s any less important to get the basic stuff right.

Pay attention

It’s all too easy to go on your phone, scroll around on your device whilst the recipient audience is talking. Don’t do this. It’s obvious and you look dumb, especially if the buyer asks a question that you don’t hear.

5. Conferences & Events

Nothing’s changed

All of the above applies to conferences and events. This applies regardless of whether the conference or event are hosted by the vendor or third parties.

Slippery Slido

In recent years Slido has become very popular at events and conferences. It’s an app that works on any device and lets participants:

• ask and answer questions; and
• vote in polls.

In each case, the feedback is live, i.e. real-time. This can be great to get instant feedback from an audience of their opinion on a key theme, topic, question or your product and pitch. But use it at your peril.

We at lawtomated can recall a toe-curling scene that wouldn’t have been out of place in an episode of The Office or The Thick of It:

• At a packed event before circa 100 financial services professionals, including senior regional heads of IT and data science, the presenting vendor of an AI solution asked the audience “Based on what you’ve heard, would you buy X product?”.
• After the initial presentation, votes for “Yes” were bumping around 85%.
• However, shortly into the Q&A a bombastic salesperson kept jumping in answering very technical questions asked by the very senior data science heads of sitting in the front row.
• Unfortunately, the answers provided were at best inaccurate, and at worst, misleading. As each answer was given, the Slido score tumbled toward 45% and finished up around 10% by the end of the Q&A.
• The worst part was that the Slido results were up on a big screen behind the presenters for all to see… not the best result, but a reminder of the points made above regarding who to bring.

Conclusion

Be prepared, be relevant and be your best self. Know your audience and match them with equivalent expertise able to ask and answer appropriate questions where needed.

Make sure your demo environment is running, not subject to maintenance and actually available when you need to demo. The more targeted and precisely you can match your demo to your prospects needs the easier it is for them to join the dots and sell your solution to themselves and to their stakeholders. If your demo can prove an ROI, even in limited circumstances, it will make things much easier and more impactful.

Last of all, don’t fake it or half-bake it. Demo only what you have, and not what you wish you had.

Originally published at lawtomated.